[comp.sys.amiga.hardware] Help! My disk won't validate.

jol@sei.cmu.edu (DR. J) (03/27/91)

Hi.

Last night I was zooing 'Liner.zoo and in the middle of the extracting my
system gurued.  When I warm booted I kept getting a error message 
saying "Error Validating disk, Key 38 already set".  I can read off the
disk but every time I try to write or delete a file, I get the system
requester telling me that disk is not validated.  I tried to use a
program called validate but it didn't work.  What can I do to validate
this disk?  It's a Quantum 80.  I hope there is a better solution than
backing up the whole disk then reformatting then restoring the files.
I really can't afford the time to do that right now.  
Does anyone have a better solution?

Thanks,
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 jol@sei.cmu.edu			"Life not worth dying for 	    //	
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tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns) (03/29/91)

jol@sei.cmu.edu (DR. J) writes:

>saying "Error Validating disk, Key 38 already set".  I can read off the
>disk but every time I try to write or delete a file, I get the system
>requester telling me that disk is not validated.  I tried to use a
>program called validate but it didn't work.  What can I do to validate
>this disk?  It's a Quantum 80.  I hope there is a better solution than
>backing up the whole disk then reformatting then restoring the files.
>I really can't afford the time to do that right now.  
>Does anyone have a better solution?

If your 'validate' program is same as the one I have, it simply forces
the OS to try a validation.  It won't validate if the disk is corrupt.
You need to run something like disksalv on it, I believe.  I recently
went through a similar thing:  I did a full backup, then tried an
Amiga format of the disk; that didn't solve my problems, so I did a
hard format (media initialization), then an Amiga format, then restored
files.  Yep, it took a while (probably 3 hours total, 65 meg drive).
But it was worth it:  I was getting occasional soft read errors before,
and now it's been completely 'clean' for over a month.

I don't mean to be discouraging; certainly in my case I was worried
sick (well, almost) that I'd loose files and maybe have to buy a new
disk.  It didn't take all that long when I decided to bite the bullet
and do it, and as far as I know, I didn't loose a thing.